5 Things The Elder Scrolls 6 Needs To Learn From Starfield’s Mistakes

Bethesda hyped up Starfield as the ultimate space simulator with hundreds of explorable planets. However, Starfield’s scope was way too big for its own good. It fell victim to the classic scenario of overpromising and underdelivering. Bethesda’s next project is confirmed to be The Elder Scrolls 6, and its development has fans on edge. 

In the wake of Starfield’s failures, fans are worried The Elder Scrolls 6 might learn the wrong lessons from it. While Starfield fell short in a lot of areas, there are a few specific ones that have stood out. These were mistakes made by Bethesda in terms of game design and are ones it needs to avoid at all costs in The Elder Scrolls 6. Below, you’ll find the biggest mistakes in question, along with solutions Bethesda should adopt to avoid a disappointing launch for The Elder Scrolls 6.

1) The Elder Scrolls 6 Needs to Scale Back Loading Screens

For a studio that is meant to deliver immersive games, Starfield has way too many loading screens. You travel by ship, there’s a loading screen. You enter any building, and you’ll find a loading screen. You cross the street in a city, you’re welcomed by another loading screen. Bethesda claims loading screens exist in their games to track object memory. You can put a thousand potatoes in one room, and they’ll be there when you return.

That’s awesome, but is it worth it to add a thousand loading screens for that bit of realism? You can argue that the innumerable loading screens break immersion far more than the lack of object placement memory. While previous Elder Scrolls games have had the same feature before, that was over a decade ago. Back in 2013, no one had a problem with loading screens since hardware wasn’t as powerful. But today, that just can’t slide. Hopefully, The Elder Scrolls 6 isn’t littered with loading screens. If there’s a dire need for them, putting a few will be justifiable. But anything beyond that will do more harm than good.

2) Procedural Generation Needs To Go

Starfield features over a hundred Star Systems made up of over one thousand planets. The catch is, they are procedurally generated and only a few of them, and only a few cities within them, are handcrafted. The handcrafted parts of the open world are great. However, the procedurally generated ones are downright boring. Procedural generation is no doubt the worst thing about Starfield. You’ve got this endless terrain on planets stretched out by nothing in between. Points of interest are few, repetitive, and far away.

The Elder Scrolls 6 should not make the same mistake. Procedural generation needs to go. Instead, Bethesda needs to bring back its classic open-world design from Skyrim and Oblivion. It doesn’t matter how small Elder Scrolls 6 is compared to Starfield. As long as it has genuinely fun locations and questlines, even a single planet will do.

3) The Elder Scrolls 6 Shouldn’t Have Half-Baked Systems Like Starfield’s Space Travel

Starfield’s spaceship mechanics feel more like a novelty rather than a full-fledged system. Compared to No Man’s Sky, Starfield’s flight systems are a pale imitation. In No Man’s Sky, you can enter your spaceship, fly into space, and then land on another planet. All of it is done seamlessly without a single loading screen.

In Starfield, when entering and exiting space, you’re greeted with cutscenes. Then, even when you’re in space, you aren’t flying. It’s all more akin to an illusion since you can’t seamlessly go from one planet to another. If you want to go to a planet, you have to open up the map and fast travel. It feels as if the spaceship mechanics are just there for show. It’s rumored that The Elder Scrolls 6 will feature sailing. If the rumor is right, Bethesda needs to make travel by sea immersive by letting you travel from one island to another without forcing fast travel. Otherwise, better to let it slide.

4) Starfield’s Missing Quality-of-Life Features Need To Be Present At Launch

By far, the biggest mistake Bethesda made with Starfield was the lack of quality-of-life features at launch. Cities were big and didn’t have maps. Navigation became super confusing as a result. Simple settings like an FOV slider and an HDR calibration menu were missing. Bethesda later added both city maps and new settings menus. But that was after the community backlash was massive against these missing features.

But even those features that Bethesda had already implemented in its previous games were missing. When you robbed people of their clothes, they’d still be wearing them. In previous Bethesda games, it was the opposite. Starfield also didn’t allow players to eat items directly by looking at them. That’s another feature previous Bethesda games had but Starfield lacked. Bethesda needs to ship The Elder Scrolls 6 with all of these quality-of-life features at launch. Starfield’s lack of them subjected it to much hate. So, Bethesda shouldn’t make the same mistake twice.

5) The Elder Scrolls 6 Better Have Fast Traversal Options

Starfield’s a giant game. Each planet has a long terrain of nothingness dividing points of interest. And the lack of ground vehicles at launch made traversing feel like a painful chore rather than meaningful exploration. At launch, you could only slowly jetpack your way across terrain. Jetpacks ran out of battery fast, and you’d be waiting for them to recharge. You’d be spending ten minutes going from point A to point B. And to add insult to injury, there was nothing in between them to make the journey memorable.

Storytelling and exploration were ruined as a result, and Bethesda realized that eventually. In a following update, Bethesda finally added a buggy as a ground vehicle. However, even that’s a big letdown since in a game as vast as Starfield, there’s only a single ground vehicle type. Now imagine how it’d feel if in all of Tamriel in The Elder Scrolls 6, there is only a single black horse to mount. Whether it’s traversal by land or by sea, The Elder Scrolls 6 needs plenty of ways of traversing.